The year in housing policy: State forced SF into a no-win situation (and Breed went along)

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Photo shot from the year that the voters stopped SB50 from going through. Since then Wiener and company have gotten better at ignoring the will of the public. There might be enough pissed off voters to take him out this year. We finally have some opponents running with other ideas of how to do his job so voters have a chance to take him out and show the other Sacramento legislators that there are other ways to govern that do not involve forcing unwanted changes on the public.

The supes did what they had to do, although a lot of them didn’t like it—but it’s not going to matter anyway.

It was a crazy year for housing in San Francisco, with the state forcing to city to adopt new rules for “constraint reduction” to comply with a new construction mandate that nobody, even housing developers, thinks is remotely possible.

The Regional Housing Needs Assessment calls for 82,000 new housing units in San Francisco, 46,000 of them affordable. (I love that terminology; it means the state wants to see 36,000 new units in the city that nobody but the very rich can afford.)

The city has six more years to reach that goal…

So now Sen. Scott Wiener, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the folks at the state Department of Housing and Community Development are going to have to deal with a basic problem:

They are asking cities like San Francisco to approve housing that doesn’t meet community needs and that developers don’t want to build…

What’s the state going to do? Penalize San Francisco for something completely out of the city’s control?

Or admit that this whole RHNA gambit was a fraud?.…(more)

RELATED:

Letter to the editor: Yes, a taxpayer can sue over the state’s housing laws by Nick Waranoff, retired real estate lawyer